Intel, AMD and Nvidia propose new standard to make AI processing more efficient

In pursuit of faster and more efficient AI system development, Intel, AMD and Nvidia today published a draft specification for what they refer to as a common interchange format for AI. While voluntary, the proposed "8-bit floating point (FP8)" standard, they say, has the potential to accelerate AI development by optimizing hardware memory usage and work for both AI training (i.e., engineering AI systems) and inference (running the systems). When developing an AI system, data scientists are faced with key engineering choices beyond simply collecting data to train the system. One is selecting a format to represent the weights of the system -- weights being the factors learned from the training data that influence the system's predictions. Weights are what enable a system like GPT-3 to generate whole paragraphs from a sentence-long prompt, for example, or DALL-E 2 to create photorealistic portraits from a caption.